CB: The eucatastrophe is always a catastrophe for someone else—the horse in LoTR, the weasels and stoats (here JC) rousted at the end of The Wind in the Willows.

JK/JC: Can atheists be moved by eucatastrophe?

JC: Yes! “The Man Who Was Thursday”—doesn’t matter that it’s explicitly an allegory, it’s still thrilling. Because things happen in stories that do not happen in real life. Atheists don’t get the eucatastrophe from Sunday mass, so it has to come from art.

GS: Isn’t that especially poignant? The feeling at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.

JK: But it’s like drinking a lot. The end of IaWL feels like I’m right at the edge of having too much and swearing off booze.

JM: My heroine (?) is nailed to a cross and gets the vinegar on the sponge but it turns out the sponge as a drug that gives her the appearance of death. The sponge…is god. And…hol(e)y. (Groans all around.)

Question period (not taking real notes here)

JC: Secret of fiction is that causality is backward. The ends produce the causes.

JM: ”Jesus doesn’t put the slipper on her foot…”

JM: Odysseus is going to have war memories…they’re not going to go away